Robert Eggers has been wanting to make his Nosferatu for a long, long time. Perhaps not quite the 102 years since the original film—F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror—hit the screens of Weimar Germany in 1922, but still a pretty darn long time. As he tells it, Eggers first saw the original film (an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the greatest purveyor of shrieks from the silent era) on a grainy VHS tape at the perhaps too tender age of nine.
The lifelong obsession is appropriate to his subject. Watching Eggers’ magnificent retelling of the chilling Gothic tale , one cannot help but associate the aching love and giddy excitement he feels to finally be bringing this story to screen with the all-consuming passion of the title character. Of course, given that that character’s desire is to possess and haunt the woman who has awakened him from centuries of slumber in the plague-infested soil in which he was once, long ago, interred, perhaps Eggers might not find the comparison overly flattering.
Eggers’ obsession with Nosferatu——not surprising from his previous three films, which explore folkloric monsters, black magic, and the most perverted, cobwebbed corners of all things psychosexual——must have long been centered on how he wanted his vampire to look. Eggers, who himself played Count Orlok in a self-helmed high-school theater production of Nosferatu, envisions the eternal bloodsucker neither as the cartilaginous, extraterrestrial basketball center played by Max Schreck in Murnau’s original nor as the sad, anemic clown played by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s lush 1979 remake. Eggers (and actor Bill Skarsgard) instead embark in a radical and brilliant new direction for cinema’s third iteration of the most famous Transylvanian nobleman not technically named Dracula.
It starts with that voice. From the beginning of the film, Nosferatu is held together in some inarticulable way by the stentorian, guttural, and raspily Romanian voice of Skarsgard’s Count Orlok. His deep vibrato and silky delivery seem to be vocalized from the bowels of Dante’s Hell. Certainly nowhere on Earth, and especially not peaceful seaside Wisborg, the hometown of newly-wed couple Thomas and Ellen Hutter (Bram Stoker’s Jonathan and Lucy Harker) has ever seen the likes of such an impossibly perfect demon.
The civilized, Teutonic Hutters can hardly handle Orlok’s evil at this subwoofer setting. Ellen (played by a subtle and surprising Lily-Rose Depp, who anchors the film) seizes up in night visions of the possessive vampire, even as she dotes on her sweet, loving husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who works for the town realtor, Herr Knock. Ellen implores Thomas not to leave town when Knock tasks him with an enticingly lucrative commission to visit the far-off Count Orlok, who wishes to purchase a dilapidated mansion in Wisborg (but refuses to travel to sign the papers). Eggers displays the Freudian roots of Ellen’s terror in more explicit terms of sexual seduction and psychological torment than in either of the two previous films, where the character’s reservations about Thomas’ departure seem less like the Cassandra-like premonitions of future disaster that they are here (Eggers also makes more explicit the idea that Ellen has been haunted by Nosferatu since long before her marriage, apparently based on an unpublished novella he wrote during pre-production). The real credit for conveying this nightmarish haunting is due to Depp’s unexpected dexterity as a physical performer. She twists and turns, gyrating in the twistedly lewd passion of her invisible thralldom to Orlok’s insatiable passions. The local doctors, tending to Ellen in Thomas’ absence, are outmatched and befuddled. Her best friend and his husband (a possibly extraneous duo played by Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) try to shield her hideous trauma from their two young, Shining-coded daughters.
For the first part of the film, Eggers faithfully follows the beats of the original—Thomas embarks on the six-week journey to Transylvania, where he is warned against visiting Orlok’s castle by local gypsies but dismisses their provincial superstitions, product that he is of the rationalism and science of the Germany he has just departed. The searingly memorable images conjured by cinematographer and long-time Eggers collaborator Jarin Blaschke during this period of the film achieve a kind of Schiller-like ethereality. It’s sheer cinematic poetry——steeped in art history as well as the visual language of the previous films, Blaschke outdoes even Herzog’s pictorially exquisite work to create the most visually rich and ambitious vampire film ever.
When Thomas finally arrives at Orlok’s castle, Eggers and Blaschke signal their radical new intentions, taking an audacious approach to shooting the blood-sucking Romanian that is clearly animated by Eggers’ desire to bring a completely different image of a folkloric vampire to the screen. Ensconced in tantalizing shadow for most of his screen time, Nosferatu bellows in that terrible voice from the corners of dimly lit rooms. We catch fleeting glimpses of his impossibly long fingers and rotting skin. But Eggers employs no gratuitous fang porn, so to speak (apparently a viewing of Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It encouraged Eggers to chuck as many genre tropes as he could out the window) and in lieu of the turned-up Count Chocula collar, Eggers’ Orlok wears a fur coat which makes him look more like a Russian boyar out for the hunt. Most peculiarly, he sports a carefully tailored mustache, making him look next to nothing like the pale and hairless Max Schreck. This is not your great-great-grandmother’s Nosferatu. This is the real-deal “nosferatu,” the figure from Transylvanian folklore upon which the serially adapted celluloid creature of “Dracula” was originally based. Eggers is desperate to exhume those folkloric roots. He is just as focused on authenticity here as he was in his earlier films (in The Witch, the Puritan characters speak in 16th century English, and in the grossly underappreciated The Northman, the Vikings do not sport those anachronistic horned helmets). While this vampire may look new to filmgoers, he is actually (and appropriately) as old as time. According to Eggers, that mysterious, eerie dialect is in fact ancient Dacian (naturally). The fur coat is based on the traditional garb of Transylvanian aristocrats.
And while your great-great-grandma might be disappointed to see such departures from the silent classic, it might not be advisable to invite her along to attend this film, anyway. What with the necrophilia, swarms of run-amok rats, and Willem Dafoe, the film is not for the faint of heart. The magnitude of the haunting may damage its chances throughout awards season, in which it has so far been frustratingly underlooked (much like The Northman was). But braving the terrors of the soul is what Nosferatu has always been about—this movie’s greatest feat is to be as philosophically challenging as it is deliciously entertaining. Nosferatu has always been about the problem of evil, exploring it in more sophisticated ways than what is found in the texts of most major religions, I would venture. The Count is an evil beyond human knowledge (“death itself” one character surmises). He has been in our dreams since long before our science and our cities and our cinema and maybe even our religion. And he will be here long after.
By Zachary Partnoy
